


Bergamot

by bjobjo, Fishwrites



Series: Portraits of Citrus [2]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond - All Media Types, Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Cats, Domestic, Established Relationship, Fluff, James is getting old and a wee bit besotted, M/M, Romantic Fluff, Sleepy Cuddles, cat gives no fucks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-06
Updated: 2014-12-06
Packaged: 2018-02-28 06:15:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2721761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bjobjo/pseuds/bjobjo, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fishwrites/pseuds/Fishwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“I distinctly remember,” said James after a long moment of nothing but thunder and exhales, "someone saying I made a sub par pillow." - "And did you turn so you could start drooling on the other side instead?"</i>
</p><p>In which the nature of whatever Q was working on can be reliably deduced from his posture - all of which were positively atrocious. Some include using James as a pillow, and then preventing him from ever leaving the bed ever again. </p><p>Alternatively: James's bladder vs Cat. (illustrated by bjodoodles)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bergamot

 :i:

 _"Love is metaphysical gravity."  
_ – Buckminster Fuller

:i:

 

James could often deduce the nature of whatever Q was doing, depending on his posture. If he was in his study or at a desk, he had brought work home with him. If he was at the kitchen bench or had his laptop on the coffee table, it was a running project, often tethered to a few hard-drives, long snaking chords disappearing onto the floor.

If Q was on the bed, it was much harder to guess. It could range from innocent animal videos to the weaponised house-hold appliances _du jour_. Sometimes James would look over Q’s bony shoulder, silhouetted against the soft glow of his laptop screen at two in the morning to see blueprints and tidy white numbers.

Either way, Q had the most atrocious posture whilst working at home.

 

After they had finished dinner and polished off a few glasses of very good brandy, James and Q retreated to the bedroom. They left the blinds wide open to see the sky: it was storming outside and the rain on the glass blurred everything like Debussy playing, quiet, by the fireplace. Q had turned all the lights off too, so that the lightening lit up the entire room when it flashed across the grey velvet sky, illuminating the rain and making the house purr.

The only light in the house was the lamp by James’ elbow, a small yellow glow by which he was reading his book. Q’s laptop screen was turned down as low as it would go, but it still illuminated his face and reflected off his glasses. He begun the evening by draping himself horizontally across James’ stomach, pointy elbows digging slightly into James’ side.

“You’re very bony,” James had said, pausing half way down his page to poke Q in the cheek. Q twitched, shuffling on said bony elbows so they were further along the mattress. He slid James a sulky, side ways look.

“Well you could try not moving so much,” he said.

“I’m not moving,” said James.

“Yes you are,” said Q, shifting himself, “Stop breathing so dramatically.”

Q’s legs were dangling off the end of the bed and James could feel the outline of his ribs on his diaphragm when he inhaled and exhaled. He could count them through the fabric of their sleeping shirts, could feel it every time Q breathed too. He let his hand fall from Q’s face, down to his shoulder, let it run slowly down the silhouette of him – sketched out by the frames of lightening. He stopped on the gentle curve of the last rib. Then wriggled his fingers in a fast skittering motion.

Q screeched with indignation, jerking up from where he was lying – and only James’ fast reflexes stopped the laptop from sliding to the other side of the bed. He groaned when Q jabbed him with his deadly elbows.

Q grabbed his laptop, peering at the screen in the dim light.

“ _James!_ ” he said, giving James a punishing knee jab for good measure, “What was that in aid of? I have to redo the last ten minutes now.”

“The last minutes of what?” asked James, setting his book aside, face down to keep his page, and sitting up so he could see Q’s screen.

“Making something,” said Q, vaguely, “It explodes. And it is not for you.”

Whatever James had interrupted, it mustn’t have been that dire because Q had yet to object to James’ hand on his right hip. Instead he was poking at his keys, lip between his teeth as he fixed whatever he had unintentionally done.

Outside, the rain continued to hammer against the glass. There was a flash of white light; it picked out Q’s profile like a photograph, the details chemically clear, including a smear of pen ink high on his cheek just beneath the rim of his glasses. The thunder itself came, a post-script, several seconds later.

Q removed his glasses for a moment so he could rub his eyes with the heel of his free hand, yawning.

“Post mission crash?” asked James, tracing Q’s hipbone with his thumb; an idyll half circle like a clock winding and rewinding.

Reluctantly, Q nodded, putting his glasses back on.

“It feels like three in the morning,” he admitted. "I imagine this is what jet-lag feels like."

James placed one hand on the lid of the laptop.

“Maybe you should take an early night,” said James. And when his hand met no resistance, he pushed the laptop lid closed with a soft _snick_ , and placed it far enough so that no one would accidentally crush it when they turned over on the bed.

“But I don’t want to sleep yet,” said Q.

A braver man might have described his expression as pouting. James was in many respects a very brave man. Certainly he was a reckless man, a man who slept with risks and woke the next morning to tell the tale. But even he was not _that_ brave a man.

“You don’t have to sleep,” said James soothingly, “Just not stare at a screen.”

“I want tea,” said Q, head turning to the bedroom door like he could actually hear his precious tea-leaves calling to him from the kitchen, desperately fluttering in their sealed containers.

James snorted, putting his other hand on Q’s left hip and hoisting up so he was sitting comfortably in the curve of James’ thigh and hip. Q went easily enough, hands braced on James’ shoulder. His palms felt cold, even through the fabric. He always had bad circulation – James knew this by way of intimate contact with Q’s ice-block feet at three in the morning.

“If you have tea now you’ll never get to sleep,” said James, “You can have more alcohol though. Red wine. That should put you right off.”

Q narrowed his eyes at him.

“I can hold my liquor just fine.”

“Uh huh,” said James, smiling.

The feeling of Q’s arms tensing was the only warning James had before Q flopped bonelessly on top of him, arms going to either side and making James exhale in a rush of surprise. He had to jerk his chin back to avoid Q cracking his forehead against bone, and got a face full of hair instead. Q was wriggling, shifting himself into a more comfortable position as they lay shoulder to shoulder, heart to heart, hip to hip. Q gave an exaggerated groan of suffering, nose digging into James’ throat.

“You’re not comfortable,” Q complained, shifting around.

Never let it be said that James was not a man of self-discipline and control.

Q propped one arm against James’ shoulder and looked up.

“You’re not tall enough to make a proper cushion,” he said, very sternly. “False advertising.”

“Oh really,” said James, trying not to laugh, “Who has been advertising?”

“You,” said Q, shifting further down so he could use James’ chest as a more comfortable resting place. He pillowed his cheek against James’ heartbeat, and for a moment James could not breathe at all – arrested in the moment like realisation trapped in amber.

“And what exactly have I been advertising?” he said, curling one arm around Q’s waist and feeling their breaths sync like two watches that had spent too long living in the comfort of the same pocket. _In, out. In, out._

In the corner of the bedroom, the vinyl switched to Edith Piaf, scratchy like the edges of a well loved book. It was a bit quiet, muffled against the applause of the rain. But her voice carried, coating the carpet and settling neatly beneath their bed.

“Edith Piaf,  _again_ ,” said Q.

James could feel Q’s lips moving when he spoke, even through his cotton shirt. It should not have made James’ pulse stutter, but it did. It was the little things, he thought, that siphoned the air from your lungs to another’s mouth when you needed it most. It then had the audacity to rewind your heartbeat like a metronome. He felt like someone was turning a key in his back even now, feel the grind of metal gears against his spine as Q realigned the blood that went from heart to fingers and back again.

He traced those fingers against the arch of Q’s shoulder blades, sharp as bird wings.

“Everything is going wrong for you, isn’t it?” said James sardonically.

Q made a contemptuous noise.

“No,” he said, after a long moment, “I like thunder.”

“And rain,” said James, thinking of Spring this time last year, sitting on a balcony in Lyon and smoking a shitty cigarette in the downpour whilst Q methodically sampled all thirteen kinds of peach wine they had found that afternoon. He thought of taking photographs of the street below, speckles of water on the lens turning people ghostly. Q's annoyed expression, caught at the edge of one frame, glass in hand and youth in the other.

They had to leave the photographs there, of course. But James could see them in his minds eye, as if the negatives had been developed onto his retinas.

Q shifted very slightly, hair a mess against James’ throat and jaw. Q smelt faintly of the bergamot tea-leaves that he left all over the house in open candle jars. He would periodically switch to a different tea-scent, but he favoured citrus for the bedroom. James thought he was losing his sanity.

He took an experimental full breath, chest rising and falling slowly. When Q didn’t protest, James rearranged the pillows behind his own back so it was more comfortable, then reached for his book. He kept his other hand on Q’s back; anchored by the warmth of him. He angled the lamp so it wasn’t shining directly into Q’s face, and was distracted for an indeterminate length of time by the shadow cast in the hollow of his bones, around his eyes and the charcoal smudge of his lashes.

Outside, lightning flashed a staccato rhythm. James turned a page.

 

:i:

 

Eventually, James developed a crick in the neck from reading, and was slowly losing sensation in his left hand because Q’s infamous elbows was digging into the inside of James’ arm and cutting off all the blood to the rest of his limb. He rotated his neck, wincing at the tension but trying not to jostle Q, who had lapsed into silence by page fifty eight and started drooling into James’ t-shirt by page ninety. Despite protesting at the early hour, Q had fallen asleep.

The storm was still going, but the rain seemed to have lightened a little. It was quieter now, less angry. James could hear the drip, drip, drip of water sliding from the edge of the roof.

There was the faint jingling by the door, followed by the patter of paws and a _fwump_.

James attempted to glare – but Q’s head was in his line of sight.

“If it were up to me,” he said, “I would never let you in the room, let alone on the bed.”

He got a disdainful _mrreow_ in response. More jingling. The brush of fur against his bare leg, making James jerk reflexively. On his chest, Q snuffled but did not wake. James debated kicking the cat off the duvet for a full minute, but decided that claws in his leg (or Q’s leg) wasn’t worth the wrath or trouble.

“Disgraceful,” he said, “the lack of discipline in this house.”

Another _mrreow_.

The vinyl had run out of tracks to play, and the gramophone was merely emitting a soft comforting scratch of static as the table turned. Edith Piaf was still clinging to the wallpaper, wine-red sweet. James knew he should get up and take the needle off. But Q was a solid weight against him and James didn’t want to move. He thought, in the private of a darkened room and locks on the windows, that he could die happy here; warm with affection recklessly given.

He folded the edge of the page he was on (Q hated the habit but James liked reading the history of a book and the way it had been loved before by another soul he had never met), folded his reading glasses and pushed them both blindly onto the bedside table. He turned the lamp away from the bed, but left it on to spill a egg-yolk yellow puddle on the floor by the door.

Q had one hand fisted in James’ t-shirt. Carefully, James unfurled Q's fingers, traced the dip in between each one, before dropping a kiss into Q’s hair. He watched the fingers curl back together, loose and comforting like a bracket at the end of a sentence.

At some point, between counting the breaths they shared, James fell asleep too.

 

:i:

 

When he next woke, the rain had stopped but the thunder was still rumbling deep in the dome of the sky. It was still dark – couldn’t have been more than a few hours – but James was momentarily disoriented by the weight pressing down on him. He patted his free hand around a little clumsily, and realised his other hand was wrapped around Q’s waist. _Q_. Still asleep.

There was a wet patch on James’ shirt, next to Q's mouth. 

James laughed, unable to help himself. It made his lungs rattle, fizzing. Q didn’t wake, but shifted, hand coming up to rest next to his own face, palms flat on James’ shirt.

It was only then that James realised the cat had migrated and was now sleeping in the hollow between Q’s shoulder.

“What,” he said.

The cat flicked an ear. James lifted one hand and tried to poke it awake. It turned its head to look at him, eyes slitted. Swishing its tail once over Q’s back, the cat seemed to curl itself tighter, settling into place.

“No respect,” said James, and poked it again. The cat didn’t even bother hissing or opening its eyes this time, simply dug its claws into Q’s t-shirt when James attempted to detach it by pulling. Eventually he had to concede the round. James sighed and lay back on his pillow.

_Cat 93: James 2._

It was a strangely lengthy thunderstorm. The rain had exhausted itself, but the sky seemed heavy with it still, lightning forking across clouds at irregular intervals. James attempted to fall asleep again, but found himself staring at the glass, at their indistinct reflections, spotted with rain.

Then came the inevitable.

With stealth learnt from a lifetime of espionage, James attempted to extricate himself from Human and Cat. First he re-attempted to move the cat by means of prodding, scratching, bribing and plain pulling – none of which worked and merely earned him a decisive swipe across the back of his hand that drew blood. (Cat 94: James 2). Then he tried to move Q by lifting him which merely resulted in fingers tightening in his shirt. Then he tried to shift him sideways and slide Q off onto the mattress. It was during this relocation process that he jostled the cat one too many times and it gave an almighty yowl of protest.

“…hrp,” said Q.

“I’m sorry,” said James, running his palm apologetically up and down Q’s back. “I need to get up for a minute.”

Q was blinking – James could feel his eyelashes moving – then he turned and propped his chin on James’ chest. He looked distinctly out of it.

“Why,” he said, somehow without having to open his mouth or move his lips.

“I need the bathroom,” said James.

“Oh,” said Q. They stared at each-other for a minute, before Q flopped back down again, this time facing the other way, cheek pressed to Bond’s other shoulder.

“Now-ish,” said James, pointedly.

“Can’t,” said Q.

“I’ll just be a minute,” James said, unable to believe he had to negotiate for bathroom rights in his own apartment.

“ _Can’t_ ,” Q repeated.

“Why not?” said James.

“Cat,” said Q, smugly.

“What about her,” said Bond, glaring at the feline in question. The cat wasn’t even looking at him – he had a face full of butt now.

“Sleeping,” said Q who didn’t seem capable of anything more than monosyllables. Even so, James could feel him smiling to himself.

“Yes,” said James, “ _and?_ ”

“Rules,” Q said, as if that was all the elaboration one required. Q would make a terrible parent, James thought uncharitably, he would spoil everyone rotten like he spoiled his cat, and they grow up to be absolute terrors. They would start out taking over the transport grid, then blow things up, and the MI6 would issue a kill order and James would have to move them all to somewhere ridiculously far away like Chile. And it would all come back to this moment, this inability to discipline his cat.

James was a selective believer in karma.

“I distinctly remember,” said James after a long moment of nothing but thunder and exhales, "someone saying I made a sub par pillow."

“Mm _hm_ ,” said Q.

“Did you turn just so you could start drooling on the other side,” said James.

“...don’t drool,” Q said. The two words were spaced ten seconds apart, buffered by a yawn. He lay, supine, liquid. An epic battle raged between James’ will and his bladder. On Q, the cat swished his tail against James’ hand where it rested across Q’s hip.

“I have a patch on my shirt that says otherwise,” James said.

“Pillows,” said Q. Then he paused. “Don’t talk,” he decided.

“How about I make you some tea,” said James, desperate.

Q moved, slotting his legs between James’ and shifting backwards so his cheek was against James’ collar James got a mouthful of hair

“…nice try,” Q murmured.

James shifted against the pillows and sighed. Q was exhausted. Better to let him sleep while he could. He lifted his hips by digging his heels into the mattress and pulled the duvet out from beneath them both, flipping over the corner so that their bare legs were covered. From Q’s shoulder, the cat gave a quiet meow of triumph.

“This isn’t over,” said James.

The cat licked his finger.

Exhaling slowly, he pressed his face into Q’s hair. Definitely bergamot.

 

:i:

(The truth was, the intervening years had seen many slotted between James' arm, head pillowed on him in sleep. He felt sometimes, like his heart was not his own, given the number of people who had pressed their ear there, listening to it. He thought it had made him hollow, scraped out the inside of his veins and left him with no secrets to give. There had only ever been two people heard and not left in the morning.  
  
Q listened like he wanted to plot James' secrets on a graph, traced over the line of his heartbeat. Q listened like he didn't want it to end.)

**Author's Note:**

> Another fluff outtake from the verse we are working on. I think days holed up watching thunderstorms and eating green tea ice-cream brings out the romantic in me. Smashed out 3K in an afternoon oops. Bjo requested and I obliged. Hope you enjoyed and do leave any crit if you have some! :D
> 
> Also I'm so shit at naming fics haha I'm literally just naming them after types of oranges. #fail.
> 
> If you enjoyed the art, please let [bjodoodles know](http://bjodoodles.tumblr.com)! If you wanna squee about 00q, please [hit me up](http://fishwrites.tumblr.com/ask) omg.


End file.
